Jeremy Carl, a Trump nominee, is the latest example of it

Joseph Weber

Ever since Donald J. Trump took office, we’ve seen white panic in full-throttle mode. Threats from within and threats from without abound, it seems.

It’s the fear of these threats, of course, that has driven the soul-crushing wave of deportations. And nowadays, it’s setting off cultural alarm bells stretching from the Super Bowl to the Halls of Congress (more on that in a moment).

But, first, the pathology long predates the arrival of Spanish-singing Bad Bunny. It’s been a longstanding nativist trope among founding white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and their progeny that they will lose their homeland to unwelcome intruders. In fact, though it is getting quite the goosing nowadays, white fear of the immigrant hordes is as American as, well, white bread.

Consider Benjamin Franklin, for instance. As “swarthy” Germans surged into pre-Revolutionary America in the 18^th century, Franklin fretted that they would “Germanize” the colonies, refusing to learn English or accept British customs. “Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation,” he wrote a friend in 1753.

Then, in the 1840s and 1850s Americans cast Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine as violent, drunk, and subhuman – and bizarrely not white. Anti-Catholic riots ensued. A few decades later, Chinese workers were seen as taking over jobs, leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banning all laborers from China.

So, it was all too consistent that in the 1920s the government set strict quotas on immigration, heavily favoring Northern/Western Europeans while banning most Asian and Arab immigrants to protect “American homogeneity.” Then, during the Depression, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, including American citizens, were forced to move to Mexico. And Jews fleeing the Holocaust were turned away as most Americans saw them as spies.

And today with Trumpism regurgitating these same themes to a fare-thee-well — mostly about Black and Brown people from places Trump infamously called “shithole countries” — we now see someone who casts himself as a politically influential intellectual crystallizing this white panic anew.

He’s Jeremy Carl, Donald J. Trump’s nominee to become the Assistant Secretary of State for the United Nations and International Organizations. Styling himself a “civic nationalist,” not a “white nationalist,” the Yale-educated Carl — who in Trump I served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks — has warned that he is “very concerned with the preservation of our common culture and our unity as a nation.”

In that, he is casting a far wider net than he might have for fish and wildlife, it seems.

But Carl, a longtime denizen of rightist think-tanks such as the Hoover Institution and the Claremont Institute, is no white supremacist, he insists. He is just someone perturbed that the “white culture” that long unified the U.S. is under threat, both by the numbers and by our legal and cultural practices.

Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts – which Trump has all but outlawed – until recently were a key part of the assault, as they are evidence of a pervasive “anti-white racism,” he holds. But it’s also a matter of immigration tolerances over the last half-century.

Carl detailed much of this in a 2024 book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart.” In it, he writes: “White Americans are increasingly second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded and in which, until recently, they were the overwhelming majority of the population. We’ve come a long way from the days when we were ‘securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity,’ as the Preamble to the Constitution puts it.”

He also sketched out the dangers posed by the non-white legions in appearances at places such as the conservative Hillsdale College and, on Feb. 12, in a contentious Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing regarding his Assistant Secretary of State nomination. Society-wide changes have driven the threats, particularly since 1965, when the Hart-Celler Immigration Act threw open the doors to new waves of immigrants and upended our demographics, he maintained.

Carl holds that the balance is tilting against whites numerically. Already, America is a majority minority country among the under-18 set. In his Hillsdale talk, he offered a helpful graphic:

And a full-scale tilt can’t be far off, he suggested …

… because the non-whites are surging:

At his confirmation hearing, Democratic senators were having none of it. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy slammed Carl, saying “underlying your belief is a sentiment that white culture is just simply better.”

When he was pressed to describe white culture, though, Carl struggled. “After nervously rambling about white food and Black food, white music and Black music and white worship styles, Mr. Carl told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that a loss of a dominant white culture is weakening the country,” The New York Times reported.

In other words, whatever it is, American is losing it.

Later, on X, Carl sought to clarify his thoughts. Despite his many references to “white culture,” his “greater concern” is with “common American culture,” he held.

It’s tough to define “white culture,” Carl suggested. That’s “like asking a fish to define the ocean. It is simply the environment that the vast majority of all Americans were swimming in.”

But he tried valiantly: “It incorporated everything from the sports we played (football, baseball etc.) to the foods we ate (Hamburgers, Pizza etc.) to the music we listened to and the TV shows we watched. This culture has its roots in England, the ancestral home of the vast majority of American citizens when we won our independence.”

Ah, yes. Hamburgers. Independence.

“But the bad news,” he tweeted “is that the culture can only change so quickly before cultural unity is damaged and our cultural identity as a nation becomes unclear. I believe that the rapid pace of immigration over the last several decades, especially from peoples and cultures far different than the American mainstream pre-Hart Celler, has damaged that unity.”

And the Democrats have made it all worse, he argued.

Addressing Murphy personally, Carl tweeted: “You and I are about the same age senator, and while the America of our childhood was certainly imperfect, you can not possibly honestly claim with a straight face that today’s America is somehow more unified and our cultural identity more clear than it was in our childhood. In fact, so much of our extremely fractious politics today is downstream of that cultural upheaval.”

So, fractious politics is not Trump’s fault. It’s all those immigrants with their fajitas, biryani, and perhaps Kung Pao chicken, and G-d know what else they eat.

Carl’s hearing moved downhill fast, particularly greased by comments he made in the past about women and Jews, as the Daily Montanan reported. There’s a lot of interest in Carl in Montana because he lives in Bozeman.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, noted that Carl scrubbed more than 1,000 past posts on X — though some apparently survived.

“Mr. Carl, you have argued that feminism has led to a downfall in American society. You’ve written that the Civil Rights Act has warped our culture and that the United States should be a white, Christian nation,” Shaheen said. “You’ve written that a post-feminist America is one of the reasons for falling fertility and rapidly rising out-of-wedlock births.”

But, as the newspaper noted, the senator used an October 2024 appearance on a podcast, “Christian Ghetto,” to quote Carl’s words back to him: “Jews have loved to play the victim. The Holocaust dominates so much of modern Jewish history. Jews love to see themselves as oppressed.”

“You continued to make anti-Semitic and racist comments even after your nomination was announced last year,” Shaheen said. “In this committee, we’ve heard from many nominees we don’t agree with, but since your nomination, you’ve tweeted more than 850 times, appeared on five podcasts and repeated this language. This is a pattern.”

And Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada, said that as the only synagogue president elected to the U.S. Senate, she was worried that an endorsement from the upper house of Congress would send a dangerous message that anti-Semitism should be tolerated.

“Mr. Carl’s vile and anti-Semitic threats are very real,” she said. “Some may try to excuse Mr. Carl’s remarks that they were taken out of context or that his own heritage (Carl has some Jewish ancestry, according to him) protects him from criticism. So let’s be clear: Identity does not excuse anti-Semitism. Identity doesn’t excuse racism. Identity does not excuse hateful rhetoric regardless of who said them. Words matter.”

For now, the White House is standing by its nomination of Carl. But defections among Republican senators could doom it. A Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee chairman, John Curtis, Republican of Utah, came out in opposition immediately after the hearing was gaveled closed, for instance.

“I do not believe that Jeremy Carl is the right person to represent our nation’s best interests in international forums,” said Curtis, who chairs the subcommittee with jurisdiction over democracy and human rights. He faulted Carl for making “insensitive remarks” about Jewish people.

What is perhaps most dismaying is that Carl’s considerable schooling might have taught him better. He has a bachelor’s degree with distinction from Yale (1995), where he served as president of the Yale Political Union, and a master’s degree in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. He did doctoral work at Stanford, where he also was a fellow for a decade at the Hoover Institution, and more recently has worked as a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.

But he also has odd reading habits. When he worked in the first Trump Administration, Carl made headlines by calling peaceful Black Lives Matter protests racist. In articles he wrote, he also cited an opinion piece in a white supremacist publication, American Renaissance, to support an argument denouncing the anti-discrimination work of former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr.

American Renaissance is an odd choice for reading matter for such a well-schooled government official. As The Washington Post reported, the Southern Poverty Law Center called it “one of the vilest white nationalist publications, often promoting eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists.”

It seems that top-notch schooling may have little to do with one’s values, morals or even common sense. Even the seemingly best-educated people can be fools, racists, ignoramuses or just plain horse’s asses.

Recall that Irving Fisher, another Yale product widely trumpeted as the greatest economist the U.S. ever produced, served as the first president of the American Eugenics Society in 1926-27. As the Yale Alumni Magazine reported, Fisher presaged Carl in arguing that immigration from certain regions needed to be sharply curtailed.

Fisher also maintained that birth control should be “extended from the white race to the colored” and to other “undesirable” ethnic and economic groups, ideally under the control of a eugenics committee established to “breed out the unfit and breed in the fit.” Otherwise, he fulminated, “the Nordic race . . . will vanish or lose its dominance.”

And there was David Starr Jordan, a Cornell graduate who served as the founding president of Stanford. He served as a vice president at the first International Eugenics Congress in 1912, and later, in 1928, served on the inaugural board of trustees of the Human Betterment Foundation, which campaigned for compulsory sterilization. Starr’s textbooks and writings portrayed Black people as evolutionarily closer to apes than their white peers: “blue gum negroes, blue gum apes,” one read.

Intellectually committed to white supremacy in all realms, Jordan in his 1901 “Imperial Democracy” wrote that Filipinos were “as capable of self-government or of any other government as so many monkeys.” Is that the sort of sentiment Carl might advance in the U.N.?

Carl’s way of thinking as a long tail. And, if he wins appointment, he’ll be waving it far and wide.